Advantage on Arcana

Booksellers’ Stalls in the Kingdom of Ewistar, Part 2

In my last post (link) I described the booksellers’ stalls that the party visited in my main Dungeons & Dragons campaign and some of the books they found there. Because my player was looking for love poetry, that is what I focused on when making up literary works for the setting, but I knew that there would be other things for sale in those stalls and I should have material prepared in case the other PCs decided to look around. Here is what I prepared. Feel free to use and adapt any of it.

Printers at Work Printers at Work, c.1590, Johannes Stradanus

The Booksellers’ Wares: Plays

I intend to talk about plays at greater length, but for the moment it’s worth noting that you could buy the script of a recently-performed play in a bookseller’s stall in early modern England; some of them were bad plagiarizations and others were official.

Tragedies

Although we don’t often call things tragedies any more, it was once one of the most important dramatic genres, including in London of the 1590s, which is my most consistent touchstone for my D&D campaign. Most tragedies are about nobility, on the view that people of higher station in society have further to fall and therefore have more tragic potential, though there is an increase in tragedies about the middle class (as there was in the 1590s and 1600s in England).

Histories

In the 1590s, the history was a common type of play, so it seemed appropriate to me to include some. However, I did not bother coming up with much of a description for most of them.

Comedies

Most comedies (which I discussed in the last post) are about romantic love, but not all are. I wanted to have at least one example in which romantic love was less important.

Farces

I’m drawing the farces from a different time period entirely than the early modern period; these are instead based on the works of Athenian playwrights and the later Roman authors. As with the histories, I did not figure out what their plots might be, though in general you wouldn’t watch a farce for the plot anyway. All of the titles are chapter headings from Wizard of the Coast’s Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.

The Booksellers’ Wares: Patters

Patters are broadsheets, essentially like pamphlets or newsletters that would be for sale in a bookseller’s stall. Broadsheets were most often sold with the lyrics to songs, but a patter was prose, either making an argument or related public events.

Polemical

Patters, or pamphlets, were a common means of disseminating ideas in early modern London. (Much more recently one of my players wondered if an NPC would be familiar with the phrase “swallowed a pamphlet” and I said that they would not only be familiar with the idea, but they’d be more familiar with the idea than most people today.) Puritans often used pamphlets, so I think of polemical patters as dogmatic and moralizing, though I can’t say for sure that they all were. (The titles of both are taken from Wizards of the Coast’s Candlekeep Mysteries.)

Current Affairs

Journalism arguably began with these patters, but they were very much yellow journalism.

Spiritual

Some patters were essentially what would later be called tracts, that is, works of religious instruction or exhortation. In the Kingdom of Ewistar, however, these would be polytheistic or henotheistic rather than Protestant. (The titles, again, were taken from Wizards of the Coast’s Candlekeep Mysteries.)

The Booksellers’ Wares: Histories and Folktales

Finally, we have prose non-fiction books (rather than patters). Though histories and folktales are not entirely interchangeable in an early modern setting, the line between is not so clear as we imagine it to be today, so I have them grouped together. As with the works above, the titles are references to Dungeons & Dragons books.

Of these, player characters would go on to purchase Book of the Raven (though much later).

As I said last time, there are some things I would do differently now. I would not borrow chapter titles from Wizards of the Coast books quite so liberally. More importantly, though, I think I left a lot of opportunities undeveloped here. The party is now starting to get involved in aristocratic politics; I had not prepared any of that yet when I invented these titles, so I was not able to use the histories and tragedies to foreshadow factions and dynamics among the nobility. If you decide to do something like this yourself, I highly recommend you take some time to think about what historical events matter in your setting, and what aristocratic families trace their lineage back to such moments, when making the history plays and tragedies. However, the problem is that most of us develop our campaign’s setting as need arises, so we can’t always know in advance what we’ll want in later months and years.

Now, I did have some successes here. A Deep and Creeping Darkness, the diatribe against republicanism, did plant seeds for a later plot point, though, when the party learned that the queen wants to implement a parliamentary system after spending her formative years exiled in a republic. My only regret is that I didn’t find a way to press a copy into one of the PC’s hands. As I mentioned, one PC now has a copy of Book of the Raven, which allowed him to better understand a rumour he had heard about certain grey elves. Finally, one of these texts has content that might interest another PC, though her player doesn’t know that yet.

Coming from a different angle, I also wish I had spent some time thinking about the themes of each play. My players do not need a synopsis for any of them, nor would it be worth my time to make one up, but I could easily tag each with one or two preoccupations and concerns: maybe King Frath’s tragic flaw is mistrust while King Laucian’s is gullibility. Even a little detail can create the illusion that these are real texts in a real literary scene. I think making the world feel lived-in is valuable in itself, even without using these details to reveal or foreshadow future characters and plot points – though if you can do both, that’s great.

Of course, even if my players never visit a bookseller again, they will quite likely encounter a street performance of a play, so I still have an opportunity to develop the literary culture of Ewistar. Next time I will talk a bit more about how I see the theatre of Ewistar.

See the series index (link).

*Originally published 19 February 2024.